What shall we make of medieval English lyrics? They have no fixed line
or meter, no consistent point of view, and their content may seem
misaligned with the other texts in manuscripts in which they are found.
Yet in Lyric Tactics, Ingrid Nelson argues that the lyric poetry of
later medieval England is a distinct genre defined not by its poetic
features--rhyme, meter, and stanza forms--but by its modes of writing
and performance, which are ad hoc, improvisatory, and situational.
Nelson looks at anonymous devotional and love poems that circulated in
manuscripts of practical, religious, and literary material or were
embedded in popular, courtly, and liturgical works. For her, the poems'
abilities to participate in multiple modes of transmission are "lyric
tactics," responsive and contingent modes of practice that emerge in
opposition to institutional or poetic norms.
Working across the three languages of medieval England (English, French,
and Latin), Nelson examines the tactics of poetic voice in the
trilingual texts of British Library MS Harley 2253, which contains the
well-known English "Harley lyrics." In a study of the English hymns and
French lyrics of the commonplace book of William Herebert, she unearths
the moral implications of lyric tactics for the friars who produced and
disseminated them. And last, she examines the work of Geoffrey Chaucer
and shows how his introduction of Continental poetic forms such as the
balade and the rondeau suggests continuity with rather than a break
from earlier English lyric. Combining literary analysis, manuscript
studies, and cultural history with modern social theory, Ingrid Nelson
demonstrates that medieval lyric poetry formed a crucial part of the
fabric of later medieval English society.
